On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 9:51 PM, William "Chops" Westfield wrote: > > On Sep 15, 2011, at 5:30 PM, V G wrote: > > > It's a bastardization of the whole concept of EE > > Arduino isn't about EE. I thought you were Bio/pre-med? Did you > transfer? > No, I'm still studying medicine. But I really like EE and mechanical engineering, and there's nothing wrong with learning everything :) > Why should a biology researcher wanting to measure breathing rate for > a sleep study using pressure sensors need to know how to design a > microcontroller circuit? A biology researcher would probably have those tools at hand or someone who knows what they're doing to design a proper circuit for them. Any biologica= l researcher without the proper skills to "design a micoronctoller circuit" inherently shouldn't be trusted to do his research since he would be oblivious to any underlying phenomenon which could affect his data. > (that's an actual example, BTW.) At my > university, chemistry majors got to take a class about making lab > equipment that used Lancaster's CMOS cookbook as one of the textbooks > (EE majors couldn't get near it; they were busy studying the parasitic > capacitance of the semiconductor junctions inside the chips. > "Cookbooks" aren't engineering, they're just tricks!) Well that's fine, because there's nothing saying you can't learn microscopi= c and macroscopic things in parallel. > Nowdays, it > would be nearly criminal for the same class not to include info on > board-level solutions like BASIC Stamp and Arduino. > > I guess. But what angers me is that all the kids coming out of undergrad still don't really know how to do anything useful. Take away the Arduino, and they're seriously left in the dark. There's unfortunlatey no course on getting out of that comfort zone. Real world problems aren't solved with an Arduino. > (And arduino isn't aimed at scientists, either. It's aimed at artists.) > Yeah, I read about that. (of course, there's a separate discussion somewhere about all the > research software being written by scientists with very little formal > training in even the basic principles of software design or computer > science, therefore resulting in buggy and unreadable pieces of crap > being the cornerstones of efforts that are supposed to shape public > policy.) Scientific papers may get peer reviewed, but the SW that > analyzed all that data? Not so much!) > Sad, isn't it? --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .